cameron labors of burton mack - westar institute · pdf filewestar spring 2016 cameron, labors...

223

The Labors of Burton Mack: Scholarship That’s Made a Difference

Ron Cameron

Wesleyan University

I wish to sing a song of praise as a crown to his labors.

— Euripides, Heracles 355-56

Observe that I have not labored for myself alone, but for all who seek paideia.

— Sirach 24:34; 33:18

“To be born woman is to know — Although they do not talk of it at school — That we must labour to be beautiful.”

I said, “It’s certain there is no fine thing Since Adam’s fall but needs much labouring.”

— W. B. Yeats, “Adam’s Curse”

I Burton L. Mack introduces his magisterial A Myth of Innocence: Mark and Christian Origins with a clarion call and a challenge to make sense—social sense—of the beginnings of the Christian religion:

Since Foucault published his Archaeology of Knowledge, New Testament scholars have thought of their work as digging. . . . The image is attractive in some respects and disconcerting in others. An aura of archeology is gratifying mainly because it seems to bless the labor as worthwhile. . . . It is disconcerting nonetheless to see what happens when the metaphor is pressed too far. One catches sight of a very messy dig and of diggers in disagreement about what they are looking for. Not only is there confusion about what counts as an artifact, there is no clarity about what a firm foundation might be were one ever to be found. . . . What if one acknowledged that the gospel story was Christianity’s charter document and regarded its formation as an essential moment in the

Westar Spring 2016 Cameron, Labors of Burton Mack 224

‘laying of the foundations’? . . . If the social circumstances of that later time were regarded as the ‘foundational’ stratum, and the composition of the gospel taken as the ‘originary’ moment of significance for Christian origins, the fantastic events depicted in the gospel might actually begin to make sense. . . . Supposing that the gospels were myths of origin for social formations in need of a charter, the scholar’s quest would have to be to understand the moment when the gospel was designed. Foucault’s archeology refers, after all, not to a quest for extraordinary events of generation prior to social formation, but to critical moments of social interest within a given discourse.1

Four features of Mack’s argument are intimated here: (1) a critique of the discipline of New Testament scholarship, with its quest for a singular genesis of Christianity; (2) a proposal for a shift in perspective on the social history and imaginative labor documented by the texts; (3) a call for the need for a serious engagement with critical theory; and (4) a recognition of authorial creativity in Mark’s composing his myth of origins, the first Christian narrative gospel. Mack’s critique of biblical scholarship, with its quest for Christian origins, is particularly trenchant and worth the price of the book:

Some event, it is thought, or moment, or impulse, needs to be discovered as the source for the novelty Christianity introduced into the world. . . . The fundamental persuasion is that Christianity appeared unexpectedly in human history, that it was (is) at core a brand new vision of human existence, and that, since this is so, only a startling moment could account for its emergence. The code word serving as sign for the novelty that appeared is the term unique (meaning singular, incomparable, without analogue). For the originary event the word is transformation (rupture, breakthrough, inversion, reversal, eschatological). For the cognitive effect of this moment the language of paradox is preferred (irony, parable, enigma, the irrational). It is this startling moment that seems to have mesmerized the discipline and determined the applications of its critical methods. All of the enormous labor devoted to the preparation of texts, the honing of linguistic instruments, and the devisement of methods has been organized just in order to approach as closely as possible that moment of mystery even if, in the last analysis, some leap of the imagination will be required to posit its presence. Where to locate the mystery has been the unacknowledged question guiding the twists and turns of the scholarship. . . .

1 Burton L. Mack, A Myth of Innocence: Mark and Christian Origins (Philadelphia: Fortress,

1988), xi, xii; cf. 24, citing Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language (trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith; New York: Pantheon, 1972).


What if the notion of a single, miraculous point of origin was acknowledged for what it was, not a category of critical scholarship at all, but an article of faith derived from Christian mythology? Then the quest would have to be turned around. Not the mythic events at the beginning, but the social and intellectual occasions of their being imagined would be the thing to understand.2

This critique is concerned chiefly with the notion of “uniqueness,” conceived in terms of “origins.”3 But since “New Testament scholarship can be described as an archeology of early traditions about Jesus and the Christ,” Mack’s criticism is leveled at the quest of the historical Jesus4 and the quest for the earliest christology,5 the “two main tracks along which the quest for Christian origins has traveled.”6

2 Mack, Myth of Innocence, 3, 4, 8. 3 Ibid., 368. See Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities

and the Religions of Late Antiquity (Jordan Lectures in Comparative Religion 14; London: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 36-46.

4 For a pointed critique of the quest of the historical Jesus, see the subsequent argument of Mack, who observes that “the quest has not produced any agreement about a textual data base from which to work. The textual units used for this or that profile change from scholar to scholar without any agreed-upon theoretical framework to adjudicate the differences among them. This is a serious indictment of the guild of New Testament scholarship . . . [which] resists the pursuit of a theoretical framework and the accompanying rules of argumentation necessary for coming to agreements about matters of data, method, explanation, and replication of experiments or research projects. These are foundational matters for an academic discipline. . . . If there is no agreement about what texts count and how to turn them into data for historical reconstructions, it means that the quest [of the historical Jesus] cannot be thought of as an academic discourse within a scholarly discipline. . . . This means that we need to start over with the quest for Christian origins. And the place to start is with the observation that the New Testament texts are not only inadequate for a Jesus quest, they are data for an entirely different phenomenon. They are . . . the myths of origin imagined by early Christians seriously engaged in their social experiments. They are data for early Christian mythmaking” (Burton L. Mack, “The Historical Jesus Hoopla,” in The Christian Myth: Origins, Logic, and Legacy [New York: Continuum, 2001], 34, 35, 40).

5 For a critique of the “Christ event,” a theological term that encodes the death and resurrection of Jesus, see Mack, who observes that “all scholars seem to agree . . . on the importance of the resurrection. Three terms are frequently used, each encoded by custom within the discourse of the discipline, to refer euphemistically to the resurrection of Jesus from the dead: Easter, appearance, and spirit. . . . These coded signs, usually capitalized, do not enlighten because they mark the point beyond which the scholar chooses not to proceed with investigation, indeed, the point beyond which reasoned argument must cease. They serve as ciphers to hold the space for the unimaginable miracle that must have happened prior to any and all interpretation. They have become an all too convenient rhetorical device for evoking the myth of Christian origins without having to explain it. . . . Appeal to ‘the resurrection’ is the most mystifying of all the ciphers used to protect the myth of Christian origins from critical investigation. The notion is


Mack’s proposal for a “single shift in perspective on texts” to be taken up for analysis in his book places special emphasis on the way in which “texts will be read in relation to their social settings,” in particular, on “social experience as the occasion for imaginative activity and literary production”:7

The shift in perspective is required as soon as it is realized that the creative replication of the memory of Jesus took place in the interest of articulating not only how it was at the beginning, but how it was or should be at the several junctures of social history through which a memory tradition traveled. . . . What if the social circumstances were regarded as the generative matrix for a recasting of the memory tradition? What if novelties that enter the memory tradition were to be viewed as creating as well as interpreting the imagined origins of the movements? What if the really interesting question were given its due, why and how his early followers came to create the aura of divine originality for Jesus in the first place? What if the several diverse pictures of Jesus contained in the New Testament were less hermeneutical with regard to the historical Jesus and more the creation of myths of origin for movements in need of rationalization?8

Mack’s book is thus “an investigation of the relation between imaginative composition and social experience in early Christian circles”; his goal is to bring “social histories together with what is known of textual traditions and seek to understand each in the light of the other.”9 Mack’s efforts “to redescribe” the “entangled textual and social histories of importance for the composition of the Gospel of Mark,” in terms of mythmaking, social formation, and intertextuality,10 call for an engagement with critical theory, with rhetorical criticism, cultural anthropology, and religious studies:

used regularly . . . as if the resurrection were a datable piece of evidence. By allowing the mystery of Easter and the [resurrection] appearances to mark the point from which the Spirit effected the new age of Christian experience and mission, everything else can be examined rigorously without threatening the notion of originary uniqueness. . . . A point of origin has been established that is fundamentally inaccessible to further probing or clarification. It guarantees the uniqueness of early Christianity by locating its novelty beyond data and debate” (Myth of Innocence, 7, 7-8 n. 3).

6 Ibid., 5; cf. 6 n. 2. 7 Ibid., 15. 8 Ibid., 16, adding: “The picture of Jesus presented by the Gospel of Mark . . . is the product

of two generations of vigorous social activity and energetic, imaginative labor” (ibid.). 9 Ibid., 19 n. 8, 19. 10 Ibid., 20; cf. 16-23 with nn. 6-10, 321-24 with nn. 3-4. “Jonathan Z. Smith’s constructive

theory of religion, more than any other,” Mack notes, “informs the position taken in this book”


The attempt will be made at every turn to position a text or a set of texts at some intersection of social and intellectual history. Viewed as a thoughtful composition at a particular juncture of human experience, a text becomes (temporarily) the center around which many other textual and social moments are organized. . . . To position a text at its approximate intersection of multiple textual and social articulations would be not only to understand it, for meaning is (1) a function of intertextual translation, but to discern its intention, for meaning is (2) a display of interest or desire. Knowing that discourse occurs at a remove from both the accidental nature of human experience and the social structures that order practice, discrepancy between the way things were said to be and the way they actually went must always be kept in mind. In the case of the gospel traditions this factor of incongruency is exaggerated and compounded by the fact that social issues were reflected and addressed not by discourse directly related to the contemporary situations of concern, but by means of repeated reference to Jesus at the beginning. . . . Nevertheless, precisely because something is known about the phenomena of discrepancy and lag at the level of the intellectual labor that supports social construction, it will be possible to identify a variety of discrete intersections where particular texts and specific social configurations kept company for a time. . . . This history can be used, then, to control the investigation of Mark’s particular achievement.11

Mack’s recognition of authorial creativity in Mark’s composition of the gospel means that “the gospel was indeed Mark’s creation.” Mark wrote “a narrative that brought together two distinctively different types of written material representative of two major types of early sectarian formation”:

One stream was that of movements in Palestine and southern Syria that cultivated the memory of Jesus as a founder-teacher. The other was that of congregations in northern Syria, Asia Minor and Greece wherein the death and resurrection of the Christ were regarded as the founding events. Neither of these movements had produced a gospel before Mark, nor would they have done so independently of one another. That is because each had remembered Jesus (Christ) differently, so differently in fact, that Mark’s combination of their disparate memory traditions has to be seen as a very daring and experimental moment. Mark stood, apparently, at the intersection of these two streams of social history at a very auspicious and troubling time, drew some conclusions

(20 n. 9). For a programmatic application of Smith’s method and theory in Mack’s book, see ibid., 19-20 with nn. 8-9, 22-23 n. 10, 27-28 n. 1, 40 n. 10, 50 n. 17, 76 n. 18, 362 n. 4.

11 Ibid., 21, 22.


about what to think and do under the circumstances, then made his proposal by writing the story he did. . . . If one wants to understand the origins of the Christian gospel of origins, one must study the way in which Mark fabricated his story, and determine why he wrote it the way he did.12

II

A Myth of Innocence is Mack’s first substantial publication that has to do with the New Testament. He had previously written a critique of the scholarly quest for Christian origins, addressed to members of the Jesus Seminar,13 an important review and critical assessment of René Girard’s reading of the gospels,14 and an essay on the kingdom-of-God sayings in the Gospel of Mark, which was issued shortly before Mack’s book appeared in print.15 But prior to all of this, Mack’s work was concerned principally with wisdom literature and mythology in Hellenistic Judaism,16 which he explicated in a

12 Ibid., 11-12, adding: “The early Jesus movements did not bequeath the social origins of

Christianity to the church. They bequeathed their myth of the historical Jesus as the account of a divine origination” (24).

13 Burton L. Mack, “Gilgamesh and the Wizard of Oz: The Scholar as Hero,” Foundations and Facets Forum 1, no. 2 (1985): 3-29. For subsequent reviews and critiques of the work of scholars who study the Bible and religion, see idem, review of Gary R. Habermas and Antony G. N. Flew, ed. Terry L. Miethe, Did Jesus Rise from the Dead? The Resurrection Debate, History and Theory 28 (1989): 215-24; idem, “All the Extra Jesuses: Christian Origins in the Light of the Extra-Canonical Gospels,” Semeia 49 (1990): 169-76; idem, “Persuasive Pronouncements: An Evaluation of Recent Studies on the Chreia,” Semeia 64 (1993): 283-87; idem, “Many Movements, Many Myths: Redescribing the Attractions of Early Christianities. Toward a Conversation with Rodney Stark,” RelSRev 25 (1999): 132-36; idem, “Caretakers and Critics: On the Social Role of Scholars Who Study Religion,” Bulletin: Council of Societies for the Study of Religion 30, no. 2 (2001): 32-38; idem, “A Secular Bible?” MTSR 26 (2014): 183-201.

14 Burton L. Mack, “The Innocent Transgressor: Jesus in Early Christian Myth and History,” Semeia 33 (1985): 135-71, citing (here, in English translation) René Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure (trans. Yvonne Freccero; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965); idem, Violence and the Sacred (trans. Patrick Gregory; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977); idem, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World (trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987); idem, The Scapegoat (trans. Yvonne Freccero; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).

15 Burton L. Mack, “The Kingdom Sayings in Mark,” Foundations and Facets Forum 3, no. 1 (1987): 3-47, who observes that the term “kingdom of God” appears only three times, outside the Jesus tradition, exclusively in sapiential—not apocalyptic—literature (Wis 10:10; cf. 6:17-20; Philo, Spec. leg. 4.164; Sent. Sextus 311).

16 Burton L. Mack, “Wisdom Myth and Mytho-logy: An Essay in Understanding a Theological Tradition,” Int 24 (1970): 46-60; idem, Logos und Sophia: Untersuchungen zur Weisheitstheologie im hellenistischen Judentum (SUNT 10; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,


series of programmatic essays on exegetical and rhetorical traditions in Philo of Alexandria,17 and elaborated in major studies of authorial composition and epic imagination in Ben Sira and other Jewish wisdom texts.18 Three theoretical findings contribute to the coherence of these projects and make of them a set. The first is the recognition of the centrality of rhetoric in the discourse and cultural formation of Greco-Roman religious traditions.19 “Rhetoric,” Mack argues, “is to

1973); idem and Roland E. Murphy, “Wisdom Literature,” in Early Judaism and Its Modern Interpreters (ed. Robert A. Kraft and George W. E. Nickelsburg; SBLBMI 2; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986), 371-410.

17 Burton L. Mack, “Imitatio Mosis: Patterns of Cosmology and Soteriology in the Hellenistic Synagogue,” SPhilo 1 (1972): 27-55; idem, “Exegetical Traditions in Alexandrian Judaism: A Program for the Analysis of the Philonic Corpus,” SPhilo 3 (1974-75): 71-112; idem, response to Birger A. Person, “Philo and the Gnostics on Man and Salvation,” in The Center for Hermeneutical Studies in Hellenistic and Modern Culture Colloquy 29 (ed. W. Wuellner; Berkeley: Center for Hermeneutical Studies, 1977), 25-32; idem, “Weisheit und Allegorie bei Philo von Alexandrien: Untersuchungen zum Traktat De congressu eruditionis,” SPhilo 5 (1978): 57-105, repr. in THEOKRATIA: Jahrbuch des Institutum Judaicum Delitzschianum 3 (ed. Karl Heinrich Rengstorf; Leiden: Brill, 1979), 23-59; idem, “Decoding the Scripture: Philo and the Rules of Rhetoric,” in Nourished with Peace: Studies in Hellenistic Judaism in Memory of Samuel Sandmel (ed. Frederick E. Greenspahn et al.; Scholars Press Homage Series 9; Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1984), 81-115; idem, “Philo Judaeus and Exegetical Traditions in Alexandria,” ANRW 2.21.1 (1984): 227-71; idem, “Wisdom and Apocalyptic in Philo,” The Studia Philonica Annual: Studies in Hellenistic Judaism 3 (1991): 21-39; idem, “Moses on the Mountain Top: A Philonic View,” in The School of Moses: Studies in Philo and Hellenistic Religion. In Memory of Horst R. Moehring (ed. John Peter Kenney; BJS 304; Studia Philonica Monographs 1; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995), 16-28; idem, “Argumentation in Philo’s De sacrificiis,” The Studia Philonica Annual: Studies in Hellenistic Judaism 20 (2008): 1-32.

18 Burton L. Mack, “Under the Shadow of Moses: Authorship and Authority in Hellenistic Judaism,” in Society of Biblical Literature 1982 Seminar Papers (ed. Kent Harold Richards; SBLSP 21; Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1982), 299-318; idem, Wisdom and the Hebrew Epic: Ben Sira’s Hymn in Praise of the Fathers (CSHJ; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); idem, “Wisdom Makes a Difference: Alternatives to ‘Messianic’ Configurations,” in Judaisms and Their Messiahs at the Turn of the Christian Era (ed. Jacob Neusner et al.; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 15-48; idem, “Sirach (Ecclesiasticus),” in The Apocrypha and the New Testament (vol. 2 of The Books of the Bible; ed. Bernhard W. Anderson; New York: Scribner’s, 1989), 65-86; idem, “The Christ and Jewish Wisdom,” in The Messiah: Developments in Earliest Judaism and Christianity (ed. James H. Charlesworth; The First Princeton Symposium on Judaism and Christian Origins; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 192-221; idem, introduction and annotations to “Ecclesiasticus, or the Wisdom of Jesus Son of Sirach,” in The HarperCollins Study Bible: New Revised Standard Version, with the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books (ed. Wayne A. Meeks; New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 1530-1616.

19 See, in addition to the rhetorical analyses of Philo cited in n. 17, Burton L. Mack and Edward N. O’Neil, “The Chreia Discussion of Hermogenes of Tarsus: Introduction, Translation and Comments,” in The Progymnasmata (vol. 1 of The Chreia in Ancient Rhetoric; ed. Ronald F. Hock and Edward N. O’Neil; SBLTT 27; Graeco-Roman Religion Series 9; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986), 153-81; idem, “Anecdotes and Arguments: The Chreia in Antiquity and Early Christianity”


a society and its discourse what grammar is to a culture and its language.” The Greeks “took a fancy to the game of public debate, noticed the skill required to participate in public forum, worked out the rules, and called it the art of speaking. . . . They produced handbooks for teaching this technology . . . cultivated occasions for playing the game of repartee, developed a satire capable of bringing critique to rhetorical performance, and created a culture thoroughly at ease with its knowledge that all discourse was rhetorical.”20 The second is a theory of “intertextuality,” of “the way in which a given text relates to its contexts as systems of meaning already in place.”21 Such a notion is worked out in detail in Mack’s efforts to chart the “intersection of cultures, Jewish and Hellenic,” by means of texts that render the intellectual tradition and mythologies of Jewish wisdom literature as intelligible modes of social thought—exemplified quintessentially by Ben Sira’s “mythic reading” of, and “meditation” on, “his own cultural history” and “social system” as an “etiology of Second Temple Judaism.”22 The third is Mack’s increasing engagement with social and cultural theory, nurtured,

(The Institute for Antiquity and Christianity Occasional Papers 10; Claremont, CA: Institute for Antiquity and Christianity, 1987); idem, “Elaboration of the Chreia in the Hellenistic School,” in Patterns of Persuasion in the Gospels (ed. Burton L. Mack and Vernon K. Robbins; Foundations and Facets: Literary Facets; Sonoma, CA: Polebridge, 1989), 31-67.

20 Burton L. Mack, Rhetoric and the New Testament (GBS; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990), 16, adding: “Rhetoric refers to the rules of the language games agreed upon as acceptable within a given society. . . . Interest in such a rhetoric is grounded in the observation that the way we talk to each other is very serious business. Rhetorical theory defines the stakes as nothing less than the negotiation of our lives together. A criticism based upon such a theory of rhetoric might hope to get to the heart of the human matter. . . . Insofar as the development of a theory of rhetoric indicates a society conscious of its culture, an amazing opportunity does present itself to catch Jews, Greeks, and early Christians thinking out loud. The name for this new historiography, an approach to texts with an eye to social histories, is not yet firmly established among scholars. But some are content to call it ‘rhetorical criticism.’ . . . Rhetorical criticism can place a writing at a juncture of social history and read it as a record of some moment of exchange that may have contributed to the social formations we seek better to understand. Rhetorical criticism may be in fact that most promising form of literary criticism for the task of reconstructing Christian origins with social issues in view” (16, 17).

21 Mack, “Wisdom Makes a Difference,” 15, adding: “Differences among exemplary texts are highlighted as of significance for understanding any particular configuration.” This means that, to understand a text, we need “to see each text as a creative product of the imagination,” on the one hand, and “to see that product placed in some context within which its particularity can be assessed,” on the other. “There are two con-texts [here] with which scholarly discourse is familiar—the social history that provides the setting for a text’s composition and address, and the literary-cultural tradition within which a text takes its place. [The] challenge is to work out an [analytical] approach to texts that can position them at the intersection of these two contexts. . . . The significance of the text itself will be some kind of reflection on the relationship between the two contexts” (ibid.).

22 Mack, Wisdom and the Hebrew Epic, xi, xii-xiii, 6.


especially, through ongoing conversations and a sustained academic tryst with the imaginative discourse and intellectual anthropology of Jonathan Z. Smith.23 Mack’s engagement with Smith’s work is first attested in print in the symposium on religion, ritual killing, and cultural formation that he convened as a conversation among Smith, Girard, and Walter Burkert.24 In the context of explicating the arguments of the principals of the debate,25 Mack published under separate cover his critique of Girard’s theory of violence and reading of the gospels as “unique,” “historically accurate,” and “revelatory” texts that take up the age-old plot of “sacrificial crisis” and “collective murder” but cast Jesus as “innocent,” not guilty—the “resolution” of the “sacrificial crisis” in “the collective killing of a surrogate victim” that stands, for Girard, as “a mechanism basic for all human social formation and the generator of religion and culture.”26 However, in presenting Jesus as a “victim” whose “innocence is such that his death may be taken as a founding event for a new social order as early Christian literature has it,” and in “accepting the gospels as accounts which disclose the reality of

23 For a review and assessment of Smith’s scholarship, see Jonathan Z. Smith, “When the

Chips are Down,” in Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 1-60; Burton L. Mack, “Introduction: Religion and Ritual,” in Violent Origins: Walter Burkert, René Girard, and Jonathan Z. Smith on Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation (ed. Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 32-51; idem, “After Drudgery Divine,” Numen 39 (1992): 225-33; idem, “On Redescribing Christian Origins,” MTSR 8 (1996): 256-59, repr., with revisions, in Christian Myth, 70-74; idem, “Social Locations,” JAAR 76 (2008): 782-89; idem, “Sacred Persistence?” in Introducing Religion: Essays in Honor of Jonathan Z. Smith (ed. Willi Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon; London: Equinox, 2008), 296-310; and, in the same volume, Tomoko Masuzawa, “Reader as Producer: Jonathan Z. Smith on Exegesis, Ingenuity, Elaboration,” 326-39; and Ron Cameron, “An Occasion for Thought,” 100-112, esp. 100-104; Ron Cameron and Merrill P. Miller, “Introduction: Ancient Myths and Modern Theories of Christian Origins,” in Redescribing Christian Origins (ed. Ron Cameron and Merrill P. Miller; SBLSymS 28; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature; Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2004), 1-30, esp. 8-15, 22-25.

24 See, in addition to the studies cited in n. 14, Walter Burkert, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth (trans. Peter Bing; Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983); Jonathan Z. Smith, “A Pearl of Great Price and a Cargo of Yams: A Study in Situational Incongruity,” HR 16 (1976): 1-19, repr., with revisions, in idem, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (CSHJ; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 90-101, 156-62; idem, “Sacred Persistence: Towards a Redescription of Canon,” in Approaches to Ancient Judaism: Theory and Practice (ed. William Scott Green; BJS 1; Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1978), 11-28, repr., with revisions, in Imagining Religion, 36-52, 141-43; idem, “The Bare Facts of Ritual,” HR 20 (1980): 112-27, repr., with revisions, in Imagining Religion, 53-65, 143-45; René Girard, “Generative Scapegoating,” in Violent Origins, 73-105; and, in the same volume, Walter Burkert, “The Problem of Ritual Killing,” 149-76; and Jonathan Z. Smith, “The Domestication of Sacrifice,” 191-205.

25 Mack, “Religion and Ritual,” 1-70. 26 Mack, “Innocent Transgressor,” 145, 142, 137.


the event of Jesus’ crucifixion instead of as myths which conceal the social conflict in early Christianity,” Girard has given “a reading of the gospels as the church has understood them”—a modern version of “the myth of innocence,”27 read “at the level of the history of ideas,” divorced from social-historical context, and indicative, in Mack’s terms, of a “Christian mythic mentality.”28 Mack’s work on religion and rhetoric, intertextuality and critical theory, Hellenistic Judaism and the Greco-Roman world, taken together, supplied the tools and provided the basis of what might be termed Mack’s own “preparation for the gospel” of Mark. A Myth of Innocence is surely one of the most important studies of the origins of Christianity since Schweitzer’s Quest.29 Brilliant exegetical arguments are made at every turn of detail.30 Here it will have to suffice to mention some major conclusions of significance. First, there’s Mack’s “characterization of the mytholog[ies] of the various Jesus . . . movements,” his “correlation” of “myth[making]” and “processes of social

27 Ibid., 150, 160, 161. 28 Ibid., 163, 161, adding: “The gospels are written from the point of view of early Christians.

Jesus is portrayed as an innocent victim, but this is false as an historical assertion. It is true only for those who have inverted the valencies from unrighteous to righteous, violence to vicarious gift, in the interest of justifying a social rupture. And those cast as the ones who killed Jesus? They are now the Jews instead of the Romans, thus reflecting the actual rivalries forced by the new social formation. By casting their myth of the vindicated martyr as a history of those events which founded the new social order, early Christians kept their distance from those events and erased the signs of their own responsibility for thinking the daring thoughts which could transform another’s violence into their own grace. This erasure is none other than the concealment of the truth about the innocence of the victim which Girard has documented for his persecution texts. So who are the persecutors writing the gospels? They are Christians. And who are the victims? They are the Jews. And what is unique about the Gospels? That the victims are cast as persecutors of an innocent victim. . . . The gospels are documents of Christians seeking justification at the expense of the Jews. . . . Not only is peace between Christians and Jews made impossible by construing the crucifixion mythically as a sacrifice, a sacrifice in which the Jews by definition must be imagined to have performed the deed which determines Christian freedom. Inside the Christian circle as well the mythic mentality which conceals the truth about the arbitrariness of the victimization is compounded now by the claim of one’s own innocence of justification. That is salvation at some cost” (156, 157; cf. 158-59; and see idem, Myth of Innocence, 354-55 n. 1, 372, 375).

29 Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906; ed. John Bowden; trans. W. Montgomery et al.; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001).

30 Werner H. Kelber has called Mack’s book “the most penetrating historical work on the origins of Christianity written by an American scholar in this century” (review of Burton L. Mack, A Myth of Innocence: Mark and Christian Origins, CBQ 52 [1990]: 162). Jonathan Z. Smith has described the work as the “first study of ‘Christian origins’ which may be taken up, with profit, by the general student of religion” (Drudgery Divine, 110 n. 43, emphasis original).


formation,” and his “careful reconfiguring of the Gospel of Mark.”31 The materials Mark used to compose the gospel—parables,32 pronouncement stories, miracle stories—are studied both as building blocks of the narrative and as “remnants of pre-Markan traditions . . . each with its own particular configuration of Jesus and peculiar social history.”33 In assessing the patterns of group formation, Mack intends to emphasize not only “the plurality of social formations and their rationales” but also “the relationship between social histories and the myths that emerged about Jesus.”34 For our purposes, four different groups can be reconstructed on the basis of textual traditions distinctive to them.

(1) The earliest written record we have from the Jesus schools is preserved in the Sayings Gospel Q.35 Mack suggests that Mark knew some version or variant of Q,36 though Mark preferred, for his own apocalyptic reasons, the announcement of judgment given in the second literary layer of the text to the aphoristic, instructional wisdom that makes up the formative stratum of Q.37

31 Smith, Drudgery Divine, 134, adding: Mack’s work “constitutes a radical and thorough-

going revision of Christian materials” (ibid.). Note that in his discussion of Mack’s book, Smith distinguishes between, and among, these three issues.

32 See Mack, Myth of Innocence, 60-61, 135-71. For additional redescriptions of the parables attributed to Jesus, see Ron Cameron, “Mythmaking and Intertextuality in Early Christianity,” in Reimagining Christian Origins: A Colloquium Honoring Burton L. Mack (ed. Elizabeth A. Castelli and Hal Taussig; Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1996), 37-50; idem, “An Occasion for Thought,” 100-112.

33 Mack, Myth of Innocence, 14, adding: “In actuality the situation may have been a bit more fluid, with some overlapping of people, ideas, activities, and the production of texts. . . . But each memory tradition does stem from distinctive social experience and determined intellectual response localized somewhere” (96).

34 Ibid., 84. Note that Mack’s “reconstruction of several ‘groups’ mainly by paying attention to a single genre and its characterization of Jesus” was, he now realizes, “too tight, insular, and cell-like” (idem, preface to the 2006 publication of A Myth of Innocence: Mark and Christian Origins [Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006], xii).

35 Mack, Myth of Innocence, 57-60, 84-87. 36 Ibid., 56, 59, 84, 170-71, 197-98, 204-5, 319-20, 323-24; see Burton L. Mack, “Q and the

Gospel of Mark: Revising Christian Origins,” Semeia 55 (1991): 22-30. 37 As I have argued elsewhere, “Although some try to deny the composite character of the

Sayings Gospel, frequently through specious appeals to the hypothetical nature of the reconstructed text, such attempts fundamentally misunderstand how theory works, and thus seek—whether consciously or not—to bypass the results of scholarship and the actual evidence of the gospel texts. For if Q did not exist, we would have to reconstruct it. Theory would demand it. And once the synoptic problem is resolved theoretically by the positing of Q and Q is accorded a documentary status, there is no reason not to examine the text for evidence of possible layers of its literary history. It is necessary to be insistent at this point. We do have a text of Q; what we do not have is a manuscript” (Ron Cameron, “The Sayings Gospel Q and the Quest of the Historical


(2) The “synagogue reform” movement was largely responsible for the pronouncement stories, or elaborated chreiai, that make up a substantial part of the narrative material in the first twelve chapters of Mark and constitute a major source for the composition of the gospel.38 Mack argues, importantly, that Mark himself is to be located within this particular group.39 Not only did this group imagine Jesus as the founder-teacher of a school that “worked out its self-definition in debate with Pharisaic teachings” about ritual purity; it also crafted a number of stories that emphasized Jesus’ authority, and combined such stories with the miracle story tradition to emphasize Jesus’ power in conflict with the Pharisees.40 Since the conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees “was portrayed as the reason for a plot against Jesus,” and “the plot to kill Jesus was hatched in the synagogue” (cf. Mark 2:1-3:6), the “conflict of the synagogue reform movement with the synagogue was read back into the myth of origins and presented as the cause for Jesus’ crucifixion.”41

(3) The “congregation of Israel” was largely responsible for the early collection of miracle stories that were arranged in two catenae of five stories each.42 These two sets, Mack argues, were composed “on the model of epic prototypes” and “replicat[ed] in miniature the story of the Exodus from the crossing of the sea to the formation of the congregation in the wilderness,” presenting Jesus as “the founder and leader of the new movement,” like Moses and Elijah, thereby serving as this group’s “myth of origins.”43

Jesus: A Response to John S. Kloppenborg,” HTR 89 [1996]: 352). See, in particular, the definitive studies of John S. Kloppenborg, The Formation of Q: Trajectories in Ancient Wisdom Collections (SAC; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987; repr., Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1999); idem, “The Sayings Gospel Q: Literary and Stratigraphic Problems,” in Symbols and Strata: Essays on the Sayings Gospel Q (ed. Risto Uro; Publications of the Finnish Exegetical Society 65; Helsinki: Finnish Exegetical Society; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996), 1-66; idem, Excavating Q: The History and Setting of the Sayings Gospel (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000).

38 Mack, Myth of Innocence, 61-62, 94-96, 172-207; cf. 379-84. 39 Ibid., 178, 192-93, 197, 199-200, 205, 244, 318-21. 40 Burton L. Mack, Who Wrote the New Testament? The Making of the Christian Myth (San

Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995), 59; see idem, Myth of Innocence, 195-99, 204-7, 233-45. 41 Mack, Myth of Innocence, 206, 207. On Mack’s infelicitous use, and subsequent retraction, of

the category “synagogue reform movement,” see idem, Myth of Innocence, 94-96, 192-207; cf. 101, 107, 125-26, 166, 226-27, 239, 244, 280-81, 316-21, 326-27, 355; idem, “A Myth of Innocence at Sea,” Cont 1, no. 2 (1991): 147-51; idem, preface to the 2006 publication of A Myth of Innocence, xiii. Note that Mack does not use this term in his description of the Jesus people who produced the pronouncement stories in idem, Who Wrote the New Testament, 54-60, 155, 158-60; cf. 314-16.

42 Mack, Myth of Innocence, 91-93, 208-45, following the important source-critical analysis of Paul J. Achtemeier, “Toward the Isolation of Pre-Markan Miracle Catenae,” JBL 89 (1970): 265-91.

43 Mack, Myth of Innocence, 219, 222, 223; cf. 230, adding: “The earliest miracle stories were not reports of the miracle-working activity of Jesus. They were carefully composed sets of stories


(4) The “congregations of the Christ” were a Jesus movement that had developed into a “Christ cult”44 and that “differed from the [other] Jesus movements in two major respects. One was a focus upon the significance of Jesus’ death and destiny. . . . [This] had the result of shifting attention away from the teachings of Jesus,” engendering instead “an elaborate preoccupation with notions of martyrdom, resurrection, and the transformation of Jesus into a divine, spiritual presence. The other major difference was the forming of a cult oriented to that spiritual presence.”45 Although “the usual view of the beginnings of Christianity derives from the Christ cults,” Mack argues, “the sequence should be reversed.”46 “Instead of reading the material from the Jesus movements through the eyes of Paul, we need to read Paul as a remarkable moment in the history of some Jesus movement.”47

Second, there’s Mack’s detailed analysis of Mark’s authorial, intellectual labor and his argument, in particular, that Mark is responsible for composing the passion narrative. Since the logic of the kerygma (i.e., creedal formulae about the “death and resurrection” of Christ, constructed as a myth to rationalize a social formation already under way) required that it need not be narrated—indeed, that it resist historicization48—Mack argues, Mark had to find a way to “transpose the Christ myth into historical narrative.” By “translating the Christ myth into a story of Jesus’

about Jesus as the founder of the ‘congregation of Israel.’ Miracle stories served some Jesus movement as its myth of origins” (215).

44 Ibid., 98-123. 45 Mack, Who Wrote the New Testament, 75-76. 46 Mack, Myth of Innocence, 96. 47 Mack, Who Wrote the New Testament, 99. For a rethinking of the category “Christ cult” to

refer to “a religious community that formed soon after the ‘Christ event’ (i.e., the ‘death and resurrection’ of Jesus understood as that event that changed the course of history and inaugurated the new Christian time) and that gathered for prayers, rituals, and instructions on the model of later Christian churches,” see idem, “Rereading the Christ Myth: Paul’s Gospel and the Christ Cult Question,” in Redescribing Paul and the Corinthians (ed. Ron Cameron and Merrill P. Miller; SBLECL 5; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature; Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011), 38, 65-71. Note, especially, that in this essay Mack has made a major revision of his initial discussions of the “congregations of the Christ,” arguing now that “both the ‘Christ myth’ [1 Cor 15:3-5] and the ‘ritual meal’ text [1 Cor 11:23-25] can be traced to mythmaking within the Jesus schools at some point where the thought of Jesus as a martyr for their cause was entertained” (ibid., 37).

48 Mack, Myth of Innocence, 254-55: “The kerygma was a mythic formulation without need of further narrative embellishment. It contained no flaw needing further adjustment, no gaps that still had to be filled. . . . The kerygma worked just because questions arising from historical placement and motivation had been bracketed. Thus the kerygmatic interpretation of Jesus’ death actually resisted historicizing” (cf. 109-11, 120 n. 15, 278-80, 354-55 with n. 1).


martyrdom,”49 Mark turned “the kerygma of Christ’s death and resurrection into a formulaic prediction of the persecution plot” (cf. Mark 8:31; 9:31; 10:33-34).50 In order to craft “a plausible narrative of Jesus’ martyrdom,” the “most important feature of Mark’s strategy . . . was the use of the old [Jewish] wisdom tale of the wrongly accused righteous man as a pattern for the sequence of episodes leading up to the trials and crucifixion of Jesus.”51 Mark “used the pattern of the wisdom story to conjoin myths of origin stemming from the Jesus movements on the one hand, with the myth of origin stemming from the Christ cult on the other. . . . The wisdom tale was the narrative device used to merge them. The gospel is the product of that accommodation.”52 Therefore, Mack concludes:

It is now possible to emphasize that Mark’s accomplishment was an authorial, intellectual achievement. In modern critical parlance, Mark’s Gospel is a very richly textured story. Its most distinctive feature is the complexity of what critics call intertextuality, the domestication and integration of diverse texts, genres, and patterns of perception in the formation of a novel literary performance. Mark’s Gospel stands at the intersection of many streams of cultural, literary, and social history. It was created by effort, intellectual effort, and it is marked by conscious authorial intention. Mark was a scholar. A reader of texts and a writer

49 Mack, Who Wrote the New Testament, 157, adding: “There would have to be a provocation,

an arrest, a charge, an ideological confrontation, some stories that made the executioners look both reasonable and wrong at the same time, some stories that revealed both Jesus’ innocence and his willingness to die, some stories that showed how the disciples and the crowds responded to these last public events, an account of the execution, and some way to end the story after the crucifixion” (ibid.).

50 Mack, Myth of Innocence, 280, adding: “The intention of the rewriting was not innocent. . . . The predictions of the passion changed the kerygma into a script for writing an account of Jesus’ death as a geopolitical event. Read in the light of the predictions, the passion plot unfolds exactly according to its prescription. . . . Time, place, agents, and consequences are all spelled out in the predictions and identifiable in the passion account. They purport to be the ingredients of a historical event, but this story does not derive from history. History was written according to the script of the persecution story” (ibid.).

51 Mack, Who Wrote the New Testament, 157-58, building on the analyses of George W. E. Nickelsburg, Jr., Resurrection, Immortality, and Eternal Life in Intertestamental Judaism (HTS 26; Cambridge: Harvard University Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1972); idem, “The Genre and Function of the Markan Passion Narrative,” HTR 73 (1980): 153-84.

52 Mack, Myth of Innocence, 276, adding: “The passion narrative was conceived as a possibility by the discovery of the martyrological substrata of the Christ myth and ritual. . . . As soon as the narrative possibilities suggested by the term paradidonai [‘to hand over’] were seen, the passion narrative was as good as written. Mark’s passion narrative is essentially an elaboration of the etiological myth of the Hellenistic cult meal through combination with the wisdom story of the persecuted Righteous One as martyr” (ibid., 303-4; cf. 268, 269, 299).


of texts. He was a scribe in the Jesus tradition of the synagogue reform movement. Mark’s Gospel was not the product of divine revelation. It was not a pious transmission of revered tradition. It was composed at a desk in a scholar’s study lined with texts and open to discourse with other intellectuals. . . . One “text” he did not have was a copy of the passion narrative because there was none until he wrote it. . . . The passion narrative is simply the climax of the new story line. The story was a new myth of origins. A brilliant appearance of the man of power, destroyed by those in league against God, pointed nonetheless to a final victory when those who knew the secret of his kingdom would finally be vindicated for accepting his authority.53

“Viewed in retrospect . . . Mark’s Gospel was the most important mythology constructed during the early period of Christian beginnings. . . . That is because it was Mark’s plot that Christians settled upon when contemplating those events foundational to Christianity.”54 In writing his gospel, “a literary achievement of incomparable historical significance,” Mark “laid the mythic foundation for the Christian religion. . . . Without this story . . . the emergence of Christianity as we know it would not have happened.”55 III A Myth of Innocence is an intellectual achievement that put Mack’s work forever firmly on the map. His subsequent studies of the New Testament and Christian origins, especially his analyses of the Gospel of Mark56 and the Sayings Gospel Q,57 were

53 Ibid., 321-23; cf. 321-24 nn. 3-4. William Arnal says this passage reflects the “central thesis”

of Mack’s book, demonstrating that “the only evidence we have for the first followers of Jesus is, precisely, literary evidence, and that therefore it attests to a literate, actively creative, intellectual, and therefore mediated . . . engagement with the world . . . a product of human labor” (review of Burton L. Mack, A Myth of Innocence: Mark and Christian Origins, JAAR 83 [2015]: 837, 840, emphasis original).

54 Mack, Myth of Innocence, 356, 357. 55 Mack, Who Wrote the New Testament, 151, 161. 56 Burton L. Mack, “Cartwheels: Or, On Not Staying Upside Down Too Long,” in

Redescribing the Gospel of Mark: Context, Composition, Project (ed. Barry S. Crawford and Merrill P. Miller; SBLECL; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, forthcoming); and, in the same volume, idem, “The Spyglass and Kaleidoscope: From a Levantine Coign of Vantage.”

57 Burton L. Mack, “The Kingdom That Didn’t Come: A Social History of the Q Tradents,” in Society of Biblical Literature 1988 Seminar Papers (ed. David J. Lull; SBLSP 27; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988), 608-35; idem, “Lord of the Logia: Savior or Sage?” in Gospel Origins and Christian Beginnings: In Honor of James M. Robinson (ed. James E. Goehring et al.; Forum Fascicles; Sonoma, CA: Polebridge, 1990), 3-18; idem, “Q and a Cynic-like Jesus,” in Whose Historical Jesus? (ed.


destined to be read in the light of this book, a work of scholarship that’s made a difference. Accordingly, in order to assess the evidence and argumentation, conclusions and implications of Mack’s book, a group of scholars launched, under the auspices of the Society of Biblical Literature, a Consultation (1995-1997) and subsequent Seminar (1998-2003) on Ancient Myths and Modern Theories of Christian Origins, designed, in part, to test Mack’s findings and devoted to the task of redescribing the beginnings of Christianity as religion. In his call paper for our first Consultation, Mack presented a critique of the canonical (gospel) myth of Christian origins:

For almost two thousand years, the Christian imagination of Christian origins has echoed the gospel stories contained in the New Testament. That is not surprising. The gospel accounts erased the pre-gospel histories; their inclusion within the church’s New Testament consigned other accounts to oblivion; and during the long reach of Christian history, from the formation of the New Testament in the fourth century to the Enlightenment in the eighteenth, there was no other story. . . . According to Christian imagination, Christianity began when Jesus entered the world, performed miracles, called disciples, taught them about the kingdom of God, challenged the Jewish establishment, was crucified as the Christ and Son of God, appeared after his resurrection, overwhelmed his disciples with his holy spirit, established the first church in Jerusalem, and sent the apostles out on a mission to tell the world what they had seen and heard. Telling what they had seen was enough to convince the Jews and convert the gentiles into thinking that God had planned the whole thing in order to start a new religion. The new religion was about sin and redemption. What it took to start the new religion was all there as a kind of divine implantation in the life of Jesus, needing only to germinate and develop as early Christians heard about it, believed it, and came to understand its import. We might call this scenario the big bang concept of Christian origins. . . . Allowing the gospel paradigm to define Christian origins is quite understandable. It is the only scenario that everyone automatically shares, thus providing a comprehensive frame of reference for scholarly research and discourse. It serves as a kind of map within which we try to place our various, detailed labours. It also protects a set of assumptions about the way Christianity began, forming as it does the basis for what has been imagined as an otherwise inexplicable emergence of a brand new religion of unique conviction and singular faith. Something overwhelming must

William E. Arnal and Michel Desjardins; Studies in Christianity and Judaism 7; Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1997), 25-36, repr., with revisions, in Christian Myth, 41-58; idem, The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q and Christian Origins (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993).


have possessed those early Christians, so the thinking has been, or they would not have converted to the new religion with its extraordinary claims. It is the gospel story that feeds that suspicion of an overwhelming something at the very beginning of the Christian time.58

Arguing that “a redescription of Christian origins would ultimately have to account for the emergence of the gospels themselves, turning them into interesting products of early Christian thinking instead of letting them determine the parameters within which all of our data must find a place to rest,” Mack cautioned that the most “serious obstacle to a redescription project,” to “setting the gospel account aside,” is “the theory of religion implicit in our scholarship and naively assumed as natural”:

The historian of religion would say that New Testament scholars work with a concept of religion that is thoroughly and distinctly Christian in its derivation and definition. . . . Familiarity with the Christian religion has taken the place of theoretical discussion, and Christianity has provided us with the categories we use to name and explain early Christian phenomena. The problem is that the understanding of religion implicit in our discipline is inadequate for the task of redescribing Christian origins. . . . [Accordingly,] if we want to account for the emergence of Christianity, including the formation of groups and congregations, the development of their various practices and rituals, the production of their mythologies, and the writing of their literature . . . if we want to discover the reasons for and the motivations involved in their many investments in their new associations . . . if we want to account for Christian origins as a thoughtful human construction . . . we need a theory of religion that gives the people their

58 Mack, “Redescribing Christian Origins,” 247, 250, adding: “However, since the

Enlightenment, the effort to understand Christian origins has been pursued by scholars as a matter of historical and literary criticism, and the New Testament account has slowly been dismantled. The New Testament is no longer seen by critical scholars as a coherent set of apostolic texts that document a single set of dramatic events and their monolinear history of subsequent influence and theological development. Instead of one gospel story, we have four different accounts within the New Testament and several other gospels that were not included. Instead of one picture of the historical Jesus that all early Christians must have had in view, we now have several competing views. We now know that there were many groups from the beginning, creating disparate traditions, responding to other groups differently, and developing various rituals and patterns of social congregation. Plural theologies and conflicting ideologies, as well as competing authorities and leaders, were the order of the day. So factors other than the marvels portrayed in the gospel account must have been at work. And yet, the older picture of Christian origins according to the gospel story, largely Lukan, is still in everyone’s mind. It is as if the emergence of Christianity cannot be accounted for any other way. It is as if the accumulation of critical information within the discipline of New Testament studies cannot compete with the gospel’s mystique” (247-48; repr. in Christian Myth, 59, 63, 60).


due. We need a theory of religion firmly anchored in a social and cultural anthropology, capable of sustaining a conversation with the humanities.59

Mack’s proposal for a redescription of Christian origins situates the study of Christian beginnings, and their social processes of mythmaking, within the context of the human sciences. Arguing for a comparative method and an intellectualist approach to matters of theory, Mack suggests that a different perspective needs to be entertained as “a kind of lens . . . working hypothesis . . . [or] framework” to guide the task of redescription, a theory of religion that he presents in the form of five theses:

1. Religion is a social construct. . . . The myths, rituals, symbols, beliefs and patterns of thinking that are shared by a people . . . [are] cultural constructs [which] can be experienced and manipulated in a variety of ways by individuals, but it is their self-evident status as common cultural coin that marks them as the religion of a people.

2. Social formation defines the human enterprise. Constructing societies large and small is what people do. It is a fragile, collective craft requiring enormous amounts of negotiation, experimentation, living together, and talking . . . result[ing] in very complex arrangements of relationships, agreements reached on better and less better ways to do things, and practices established to pass on the knowledge and skills accumulated in the process. . . . [If] ask[ed] about the reasons for and the processes whereby early Christian myths and rituals were first conceived and agreed upon . . . [the answer would be that] the Jesus movements and the congregations of the Christ were attractive as intentional experiments in social formation and mythmaking.

3. Myths acknowledge the collective gifts and constraints of the past and create a foil or gap for thinking critically about the present state of a group’s life together. . . . Early Christians entertained fantastic mythologies, not because they were overwhelmed by encounters with a god or a son of God, but because they wanted to comprehend and justify their investments in a movement that made social sense to them.

4. Rituals are the way humans have of concentrating attention on some activity or event of some significance to a group, and observing its performance apart from normal practice. . . . Rituals are social occasions, require roles, invite attendance, display skills, confirm loyalties, trigger commitments, evoke thoughtfulness, and reconstitute the structure of a group without having to engineer it any other way.

59 Ibid., 248, 251, 252, 254; repr. in Christian Myth, 60-61, 64, 63, 65, 67-68.


5. Mythmaking and social formation go together. . . . Experimentation and bricolage mark the ways in which myths get rearranged and groups reform. . . . Even the most daring social experiments and the most fantastic mythic constructs turn out to be thoughtful and constructive attempts to regain sanity in a social situation that threatens human well-being. In the case of early Christians . . . the making of their myths and the processes of forming social groups were constructive and thoughtful human activities. And [so,] whenever we have the chance to catch sight of both mythmaking and social formation happening at the same time in the same place, we need to explore the relationship of the one to the other.60

The theory of religion which Mack proposes here takes mythmaking to be a correlate to social formation. “By noting the way in which a group had formed and the role it saw itself playing in the larger scheme of things,” Mack writes, “we can place each of our texts at a particular moment in the history of early Christian groups and see how each was responding to its times.”61 Mack’s thesis—the identification of a nexus, or correlation, between mythmaking and social formation, which regards their intersection or juncture as “a moment of social and discursive activity that is generative”62—gave rise to a serious theoretical debate among members of the Seminar.63 It was clear that more work needed to be done, to see whether, and how, we can “specify the nexus between mythmaking and social formation without assuming a relationship of conformity, causality, or reciprocity,” and how in our “concept of intersections or junctures of

60 Ibid., 254, 255-56, emphasis original; repr. in Christian Myth, 68, 69, 70. 61 Mack, Who Wrote the New Testament, 11, adding: “The scholarly terms for these activities,

one behavioral, the other intellectual, are social formation and mythmaking. Social formation and mythmaking are group activities that go together, each stimulating the other in a kind of dynamic feedback system. Both speed up when new groups form in times of social disintegration and cultural change. Both are important indicators of the personal and intellectual energies invested in experimental movements. . . . Social formation and mythmaking must therefore be given a prominent place in our redescription of early Christian history. In every early Christian community from which we still have any evidence, social formation and mythmaking fit together like hand in glove” (ibid., emphasis original; cf. 11-15).

62 Burton L. Mack, “Remarkable,” in Redescribing Christian Origins, 472. 63 See William E. Arnal and Willi Braun, “Social Formation and Mythmaking: Theses on Key

Terms,” in Redescribing Christian Origins, 460-62; cf. 459-67; and, in the same volume, Mack, “Remarkable,” 472-73; Luther H. Martin, “History, Historiography, and Christian Origins: The Jerusalem Community,” 271-72; idem, “Redescribing Christian Origins: Historiography or Exegesis?” 476-77; Jonathan Z. Smith, “Dayyeinu,” 486; Cameron and Miller, “Ancient Myths and Modern Theories of Christian Origins,” 17-18, 20-22; idem, “Issues and Commentary,” 454-55; and idem, “Conclusion: Redescribing Christian Origins,” 511-16; cf. 497-516.


mythmaking and social formation,” we can “include situations of incongruity or discrepancy, ways to describe gaps between myths and social circumstances.”64 Mack’s efforts to make sense of the logic and historical legacy of the gospel story as the origin of the myth of Christian origins mean that he had to work out, more systematically, the theoretical underpinnings of his argument, not just in terms of mythmaking and social formation but also in terms of social interests (as a way to talk about collective motivations) and social logic (our category for the relationship of a given myth to the processes of social formation). Noting the way that the term “interest” is used by Jonathan Z. Smith for the features of an exemplary myth or ritual that Smith finds intellectually “interesting” or is “interested” in, Mack suggests that interest, a term that combines “connotations of curiosity about, and investment in, a matter,” while also delineating “a complex, purposive process,”65 can be used to construct a social theory of religion. “Interest” (a) captures “the sense we have that a social system both limits and directs the use of power, persuasion or force,” thus giving “the impression of purpose, objective, and motivation”; (b) it does not have “any distinctively religious connotations, but can be used in regard to any system of signs, practices, or social structures, including religion”; (c) it bears “the connotation of inquisitiveness, thus making it possible to include intellectual activity and cognitive functions within the cluster of activities that produce a social system”; (d) it carries “the connotation of reward due an investment,” a “motivational nuance for the intellectual labor required to produce a religion”; and (e) it is also “thoroughly constructive . . . as a general term for collective motivation,” for taking interest, and being invested, in the human enterprise.66 And so, building on his initial discussions of a possible Jesus school in Jerusalem, having some connection to the Jesus movements—not the congregations of the Christ—and interest in Jewish identity,67 and of the social situation and underlying social interests that can be inferred when the term christos first took hold as a designation for Jesus,68 Mack began work on a series of

64 Cameron and Miller, “Redescribing Christian Origins,” 515; and see, in addition, Ron Cameron and Merrill P. Miller, “Introducing Paul and the Corinthians,” in Redescribing Paul and the Corinthians, 8, 15; and, in the same volume, idem, “Redescribing Paul and the Corinthians,” 290.

65 Mack, “Religion and Ritual,” 69. See, for example, Smith’s own remarks in the “Discussion” of his paper on “The Domestication of Sacrifice,” in Violent Origins, 206-7, 209-11, 215, 222-24.

66 Burton L. Mack, “A Radically Social Theory of Religion,” in Secular Theories on Religion: Current Perspectives (ed. Tim Jensen and Mikael Rothstein; Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2000), 131-32.

67 Burton L. Mack, “A Jewish Jesus School in Jerusalem?” in Redescribing Christian Origins, 253-62.

68 Burton L. Mack, “Why Christos? The Social Reasons,” in Redescribing Christian Origins, 365-74.


studies in quest of a “social theory of religion,” a “theory of religion that can explain Christian origins,” a theory of “religion as social interest.”69 Myth and the Christian Nation70 is the book that presents Mack’s social theory of religion in a programmatic way, and that develops the initial critique he made of the logic and legacy of Mark’s Gospel,71 and then elaborated in critical assessments of innocence and power in the Gospel of Mark72 and of the legacy of the Bible as Christian myth in the mentality of contemporary American culture.73 Mack’s “thesis,” that “religion is a mode of thinking about social constructions,” and his “theory,” of “religion as social interest”—“religion as a human construction in the interest of the human

69 Burton L. Mack, “Explaining Religion: A Theory of Social Interests,” in Christian Myth, 83,

91, adding: “The concept of religion as social interest” means that “religion is generated by social interests, and that it functions to maintain and manipulate social interest just as the other systems of signs and patterns of practices that structure human societies” (84, emphasis original). See, in the same volume, idem, “Explaining Christian Mythmaking: A Theory of Social Logic,” 101-25; idem, “Social Formation,” in Guide to the Study of Religion (ed. Willi Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon; London and New York: Cassell, 2000), 283-96.

70 Burton L. Mack, Myth and the Christian Nation: A Social Theory of Religion (Religion in Culture: Studies in Social Contest and Construction; London: Equinox, 2008).

71 Not only is “the Christian gospel . . . the lens through which Western culture has viewed the world,” Mack writes. “The Christian gospel continues to function as the lens by which the world is viewed, ordered, and interpreted” (Myth of Innocence, 368, 369; cf. 353-76, esp. 368-76).

72 “Mark set Jesus in opposition to the Pharisaic laws of purity and the sacrificial system of the temple cult,” Mack writes. “In Mark’s depiction, Jesus represented power, sheer power, the power of God in confrontation with the power of the Jewish high priest, the power of the Jewish king, and the power of the Roman empire. Jesus’ power was pure, but it was a kind of purity other than [that] assumed by the temple system. Jesus was pure, not because he resided at the pinnacle of priestly activity, but because he was the (royal) Son of God by virtue of an anointing with the holy Spirit from God. The holy spirit in Jesus was out to rout the unclean spirits in control of the worldly kingdoms. This was a new notion of purity, a union of sovereign sacrality and priestly holiness. . . . Mark’s gospel introduced the notion of innocence to the characterization of Jesus as the man of power and purity. . . . Jesus became the Christian symbol of a social anthropology in which power, purity, and innocence implode in the moment of [crucified] violence. . . . Power, purity, and innocence had been collapsed in the single figure of Jesus as the Son of God who, from Mark’s perspective, had every right to violate the temple and challenge the sovereignty of the Second Temple state. . . . It is the concentration of power, purity and innocence in a single anthropological figure . . . that marks [America’s] mythological mentality” (Burton L. Mack, “Power, Purity, and Innocence: The Christian Imagination of the Gospel,” in Power, Powerlessness, and the Divine: New Inquiries in Bible and Theology [ed. Cynthia L. Rigby; Scholars Press Studies in Theological Education; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997], 253, 254, 255, 260; cf. 258, repr., with revisions, in Christian Myth, 142-43, 145, 150; cf. 148-49).

73 See Burton L. Mack, “Scriptures, Myths, and Power: The Bible at Work,” special issue, Postscripts: The Journal of Sacred Texts & Contemporary Worlds 5, no. 1 (2009): 5-141; idem, Christian Mentality: The Entanglements of Power, Violence, and Fear (Religion in Culture: Studies in Social Contest and Construction; Durham: Acumen, 2011).


enterprise of social formation”—mean that this book is a “study of religion as a human investment in social interests.”74 Social interest is the category Mack uses to refer to collective motivations, to describe the “collective investments” humans take “in the construction of society.”75 Observing “some obvious links between social structures and practices on the one hand, and themes common to myths and rituals on the other,” and noticing “the ways in which [myths and rituals] relate to social practices, interests, and situations,” Mack illustrates “the thematic links between myths and rituals and . . . social interests” with a “short list . . . of social interests that can then be studied in relation to the structures of particular societies.” The list includes territory, the people, rites of passage, food production (both agrarian and pastoral), ancestors, memorial festivals, systems of tuition, kinship, classification, and exchange.76 “When the interests derived from the other systems that structure human societies are transposed into the imaginary worlds of myth and ritual,” Mack notes, “their transposition . . . in mythic mode . . . triggers a transformation of the theme.” Thus, for example:

Interest in kinship as a system may shift to interest in ancestral legends, genealogy, and descent. Mapping one’s territory is often transfigured as an account of creation. Technologies of production are imagined as discoveries, inventions, or first-time stories. Tuition takes the form of example stories set in a fantastic world or past. The alreadiness of social arrangements is often accounted for in terms of origin stories in which precedence is established by patriarchs, powers, and authorities not accessible for questioning.77

“When compared with the other systems of signs and patterns of practices that structure human societies,” Mack writes, “systems of myth and ritual manifest three distinctive characteristics”:

(1) they focus attention upon figures and actions in orders of time and space at a distance from the everyday world of activity; (2) they exaggerate the descriptions of the figures and activities that inhabit those imaginary worlds in ways that mark them as different from their counterparts in the world of actual experience; and (3) they may include the attributes of intention and performance of the frequently powerful agents located in those imaginary worlds. In sum: imaginary world; fantastic features; powerful agents.78

74 Mack, Myth and the Christian Nation, xi, 72, 11, xii; cf. 274-75. 75 Ibid., 75, emphasis original; cf. 52, 72-76, 78, 255. 76 Ibid., 52; cf. 42-44, 52-76. 77 Ibid., 78. 78 Ibid., 76.


“Myths and rituals enlarge the empirical world of a society to include a world of the imagination that encompasses the past and future of a people,” as well as “the forces of nature that impinge upon the practices of the people.” They also “mark moments of social interests, social practices, and the cultivation of customary habits of thought.”79 This means, Mack argues, that “myths and rituals should not be thought of as practices that cultivate ‘religious’ interests in contrast to social interests and practical interests. They are the ways in which the expanded habitus of human societies is acknowledged, memorialized, manipulated, and contested. Religion thus explained is not only part and parcel of the systems that structure human societies; its distinctive functions appear to be essential extensions of the other systems of signs and patterns of practices. Myths and rituals are not only generated by social interests, they are the ways in which social interests continue to be shaped, criticized, thought about, and argued over in the ongoing maintenance of a society.”80 Accordingly, inasmuch as “myths take the form of narratives in which deities are protagonists of actions that take place at a juncture where the human world and the natural environment are imagined to meet in dynamic relations,” myths and rituals provide “our data for developing a social theory of ‘religion’ that can then be used to analyze the social logic of the Christian myth and ritual system” as “a grammar that supports Christian mentality” and as “a legacy that is still at work among us.”81 Having developed a set of categories to explain the social interests and intellectual investments at work in myths and rituals, Mack turns to early Christian mythmaking and applies these categories to a redescription of Christianity as a religion, tracing a three-hundred year history from its beginnings to the time of Constantine and the establishment of Christendom as the official religion of the empire, with the church’s Bible, creed, and rituals, basilicas, patterns of pilgrimage, and systems of patronage.82 The momentous changes that resulted from the conversion of Constantine in the fourth

79 Ibid., 76, 84. 80 Ibid., 81. 81 Ibid., 87, 44, 12, 13. See Burton L. Mack, “Christ and the Creation of a Monocratic Culture,”

in Christian Myth, 153-75, esp. 166-70; idem, “Scriptures, Myths, and Power,” 44-51; idem, Myth and the Christian Nation, 193-99 (describing the “imagined world” where agents, personified as gods, and events can be located), 199-209 (describing the “mentality” taken for granted and characteristic of a people), 200-203 (describing the mythic “structure” of the imagined world of Christendom, given with the myth-ritual system), and 203-9 (describing the “grammar” for thinking about the real world and all that happens within it, and for making judgments about situations and circumstances that arise).

82 See Mack, Myth and the Christian Nation, 146-99, citing Jonathan Z. Smith, To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (CSHJ; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 74-95, 154-70; see also idem, “Scriptures, Myths, and Power,” 38-41; idem, Myth of Innocence, 357, 361-64.


century transformed Mark’s myth of origins into the primary myth and ritual text for the Christian church, the mythic foundation and charter for Christendom. Therefore, Mack concludes his remarkable study of Mark and Christian origins with a redescriptive definition of Christianity as religion:

And so it is that a single event, composite and complex, has haunted the Christian imagination for nearly two thousand years. That event is the manifestation of divine authority and power breaking into human history, coming to a violent climax in the crucifixion of God’s Son. His vindication by resurrection . . . envisages the radical transformation of human society intended, and guarantees the eventual actualization of the perfectly just and peaceable kingdom. . . . The history of the Christian religion can be told as the history of re-imagining the event of the Christ. [Since] the Christ event is a symbol of radical transformation . . . the history of Christianity can be told as the history of the representation of the Christ event as the vision and vehicle of what the world must become. . . . To imagine the Christ event is to imagine the originary event that generates personal faith even as it generates the history of the church. . . . The church is [thus] a social historical institution that defines itself in the act of replicating its origination by means of the symbols of its origin.83

Thus it was that “Mark’s fiction of the passion, contrary to his own intentions, provided inadvertently the text for a marvelous ritual system designed to enact in the present those events at the beginning that marked the origination of the church.”84

83 Mack, Myth of Innocence, 365, 366; cf. 364-68. 84 Ibid., 363.

cameron labors of burton mack - westar institute · pdf filewestar spring 2016 cameron, labors...

Documents